Stadtfriedhof (Göttingen)

The old Stadtfriedhof (City Cemetery) in Göttingen is a historic cemetery with graves of important scholars. It is the final resting place of no less than eight Nobel Prize winners: Max Born, Otto Hahn, Max von Laue, Walther Nernst, Max Planck, Otto Wallach, Adolf Windaus and Richard Zsigmondy.

The Stadtfriedhof Chapel designed by city architect Heinrich Gerber

Location and history

The cemetery is located at the western edge of the city of Göttingen. The site has an area of about 36 acres (15 ha), on which there are approximately 60,000 burial and urn sites.[1]

Due to the growing population of Göttingen in 1879 Mayor Georg Merkel decided to create a new cemetery at the city limits at Grone, today a suburb of Göttingen. The first section, which covered an area of 7.5 acres (3.0 ha), was inaugurated in December 1881, and replaced the Albanifriedhof as a burial site. The cemetery chapel was designed by city architect Heinrich Gerber during the first expansion of the cemetery around the turn of the century. This was the first of five expansions, the last of which was in 1963. In 1975 the town burial site was moved to the newly created Parkfriedhof Junkerberg. Since then, only existing burial rights are allowed at the Göttingen City Cemetery. A redesign of the site to a park has been repeatedly discussed, but has not yet been done.[1][2]

In the centre of the cemetery about 1000 graves form a memorial cemetery for the victims of war and tyranny. There is also an old, small, Jewish cemetery on the northwest side of the cemetery, with burial sites dating back to 1843.[1]